plant hunting

Ernest Wilson was the foremost plant collector of his generation, responsible for introducing over 1,000 species to our gardens in the West. The authors of this book reveal Wilson’s adventures through excerpts from his own writings as well as describing their own experiences tracing his journeys in the wilds of China today.
Wilson’s legacy includes glass plate photographs taken in Sichuan at the beginning of the 20th century, depicting landscapes, villages, river scenes, people and plants, veteran and exceptional trees. Armed with copies of these images, and with the help of Chinese guides and local knowledge, the authors retraced Wilson’s footsteps, taking photographs themselves. The result is a splendid series of ‘then and now’ images which are a key feature of this informative homage to a great plant hunter.

This book is the story of the extensive travels made by two Peters in search of plants in Turkey, India, Nepal, Bhutan, China and Tibet. On nearly every expedition, they explored territory where no western plant hunters had been since such great explorers as Frank Kingdon Ward, and some of the trails they followed were so remote and rough that they had never before been botanised.

Every trip was an adventure, and every adventure bore the seeds of success. Where the Himalayan range meets the gorge country of south-west China lies the richest temperate flora in the world. Here the plant life can mate, mutate and migrate in an evolutionary stew that challenges the botanist to classify it. With their Chinese and Indian colleagues, the Peters introduced many plants, especially rhododendrons, new or lost to cultivation, often saving them from extinction, many of which can be grown outside in the temperate regions of Europe and the United States of America.